In Mad Max: Fury Road, Charlize Theron, as Imperator Furiosa, smuggles five women being kept as concubines out of the Citadel of the warlord known as Immortan Joe. Her goal is to take them to the green place she remembers from her childhood. And since seeing the film, and given that so much of the discussion around the film has become a celebration of what many see as its subversive feminist politics, I can’t stop thinking that feminism itself is, in a way, a quest not to find but to create a green place, a better world than the one we’ve already made for ourselves. It’s a long, hard journey. It’s something that has to be fought for. And as the word “feminist” keeps showing up in the reviews and articles I read celebrating the film, I’m interested not so much in what this says about Mad Max but what it says about our ideas of feminism. Is Fury Road merely compatible with our ideas of what feminist cinema might look like? Or is it emblematic of those ideas? The former possibility I respectfully disagree with. The latter scares me.

Feminism must be a collective movement. We’re not gonna get anywhere on our own. That means intense disagreements and hard conversations. You think the green place is a little more in this direction. I think it’s a little more in that one. We’re never all going to agree on exactly how to get there or exactly what it’s going to look like when we do. Right now, I just want us to put patriarchy in the rear-view mirror and get closer to the spot where we can plant the seeds and make a new green place, together. There are things we figure out on the road, things we make up as we go along. So this is not me saying that anyone is wrong to love Fury Road in whatever way they love it, to feel like it is empowering, or to feel like it is compatible with their ideas of feminism. I get that these things can be very personal. Film, and feminism, are intensely personal for me, too. I have had people tell me that Furiosa gave them joy and hope. I don’t think they are wrong to feel that. I feel some of that, too. I am not trying to take that away from anyone.

I think Fury Road is an imaginative and exhilarating action film. I think the storytelling is wonderfully economical, that both Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy do a lot with very little, and that George Miller imbues the frame with a crackling kineticism and clarity that are all but unseen in American studio-produced action films. This is true, distinctive action filmmaking of the sort that illuminates just how sloppy, incoherent, and bland most action filmmaking is. I think there is humanity in it, and uplift, and that the journey has a mythic power that, elevated by Junkie XL’s excellent score, sometimes takes on a spiritual dimension.

And I think Charlize Theron’s Furiosa is incredibly captivating, as action heroes go. If the projected next film in the series, Mad Max: Furiosa, gets made, I fully expect to look forward to it, and to watch it, and to enjoy it.

However, where many see in Fury Road a deeply subversive, feminist film that might superficially look like just a big, dumb action movie, I see an excellent action film with superficial elements that may seem subversive and “feminist” but that, at its core, in its structure and visual language, does not actually challenge the patriarchal status quo. I find it politically safe. What I suppose it may do is nudge us closer to being a society where women are about as likely to be the heroes of action films and violent video games as men are. And of course, if we must have tons of violent entertainment each year, then sure, I suppose I would call having women who are presented as capable, determined heroes and not as sex objects make up half or more of the heroes in such entertainment some kind of progress, although not the kind that I’m really interested in. 

But I hardly think that you make a violent game or film a piece of “feminist” media just by swapping out the male hero for a female one; when I think of filmmaking that is truly made with a feminist ethic, I think of filmmaking that presents alternatives to patriarchy or that nudges us to seriously question core elements of patriarchy such as domination through violence and the objectification of women. And I don’t really see that in Mad Max: Fury Road. Yes, the villain, Immortan Joe, rules his people in a violent and vile patriarchy that objectifies and uses women and that indoctrinates, chews up and spits out men. Joe is bad and his patriarchy is bad. But it is a patriarchy so extreme in its awfulness that only extreme misogynists will be challenged by this film’s gender politics. In that sense, it is to misogyny what the awful film Crash is to racism. (That’s not to say that I think Fury Road is an awful film, I don’t think it is at all. Fury Road is an action film that rapidly paints a picture of a monstrous patriarchy to make us hate the villain, and the extremity serves its purpose within the film, but I don’t think it says anything illuminating or challenging about the kind of patriarchy most of us live in every day.)

I also think there can be little dispute that our experience of the film is also one of delighting in the thrilling spectacle of violence, and that part of what we find so electrifying about Furiosa is her skill at dishing out violence. Well, some might say, what do you expect? It’s an action film! To which I say yes, and there are ways in which I enjoy that and appreciate it and admire it, but let’s also acknowledge that there is political meaning embedded within that fact, that this in and of itself celebrates violence.

In her 1968 essay “On Violence: Film Always Argues Yes,” Renata Adler wrote,

The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people—on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material; that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes; or that the brutal hangings in The Dirty Dozen and In Cold Blood will convert one soul from belief in capital punishment. No matter what the filmmakers intend, film always argues yes…Movies glamorize, or they fail to glamorize. They cannot effectively condemn—which means that they must have special terms for dealing with violence.

Now, I think it may be possible for a film to present violence as abhorrent and tragic, but Mad Max: Fury Road is not a film that even requires us to consider this possibility. It is deliberately, unambiguously and very successfully one of the most exhilarating and inspired displays of violent spectacle ever made. It argues “yes, yes, YES!” And it’s partially that I think we are way too enamored with violence in our culture and perhaps partially that I rarely go a day without thinking that in the event that violence does occur in my life, I will almost certainly be on the receiving end of it, but while some part of me can’t help but find Furiosa inspiring, I do not find her personally empowering.

This is not to say that we don’t need representations of women who must resort to violence to protect themselves or others, or to overthrow oppressors, or to assert their own humanity within dehumanizing patriarchal systems. Of course women must sometimes do these things and of course I believe representations of women doing those things can be valuable. I grew up in a home with a sometimes-violent alcoholic father and a mother (my hero and the strongest woman I have ever known) who did what she had to do, often at great risk to herself, to resist him and to protect me, so I don’t think that I am naive about this. And maybe if Fury Road had, at about the halfway point, stopped being an action film, had shifted its focus entirely and been about Furiosa and Max and the brides and the Vuvalini planting seeds out in the wasteland and trying to create a new green place free of patriarchy, free of domination through violence and the objectification of women, maybe then I would have found it a politically radical film, a film actually concerned with showing that alternatives to patriarchy are possible and desirable. 

But for Max, Furiosa and the rest of their ragtag bunch, there is no alternative but to turn around and head right back into the heart of Immortan Joe’s patriarchy. Endless terrain stretching out all around them and still there’s no alternative, no escape. For them, patriarchy is inevitable. You can say that the implication at the end is that Furiosa and the rest are going to try to create a new society at the Citadel now that Joe has been overthrown, and I’d agree with you, but I’d also say that this isn’t what the film is actually concerned with.

And despite the refrain of “We are not things,” I don’t think that the film succeeds (or even really tries to succeed) at not objectifying Immortan Joe’s “brides,” the women liberated from the Citadel by Furiosa. (Sure, the way they are presented here may be considerably better than the way actress Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was presented in one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films, but I don’t think that’s saying much.) Yes, it “makes sense” that the brides would be conventionally attractive and that Immortan Joe would have dressed them in revealing, frilly clothing, but the camera’s gaze also encourages us to see them as “eye candy,” a term used by A.O. Scott in his review for the New York Times. And despite the harsh conditions of their journey, the women look hardly the worse for wear as the film progresses. They remain beautiful, for us. What if Furiosa had saved the women being milked at the Citadel instead of the brides? Are their lives worth less than those of the brides because they’re not as conventionally attractive? It seems to me that the film thinks so. Ask yourself: Would you, as an audience member, have been as invested in the story if the women being rescued and fought over didn’t look like this? Even if the answer for you is “yes,” for many people, the honest answer would be “no.” Justin Chang, reviewing the film for Variety, said that “Even when (the brides) join in the fight, it can be hard to tell where erotic fantasy ends and empowerment fantasy begins.”

Which brings me to the other sense (aside from “violent female hero in action game or movie”) in which I most often hear the term “empowering” used: with reference to pop stars or actresses expressing the “power” in their sexuality by choosing to dress in certain sexualized ways for a music video or doing a nude photo shoot or what have you, or with reference to fictional female characters, like Bayonetta, who seem to find power in such expressions of sexuality (though of course, as fictional characters, they are not choosing to do so, they are made to do so by their creators). I’ve written about Bayonetta before. As for actual, living, breathing celebrities with cultural influence who choose to do this, well, of course I support their right to make such choices and to feel good about making such choices, but I don’t think we should ignore that they are choosing to do so within a system that wants to profit from the sexualization and objectification of women.  

And while I’ve never been a pop star or celebrity, I have been in a system (and then been kicked out of a system) where I was told again and again, explicitly and implicitly, that I was unqualified for the role and doomed to failure in it because I wasn’t appealing to straight men. For so many, this was a very real part, perhaps even the most important part, of a woman’s role in that sphere, the thing that, more than anything else, determined a woman’s value. And where did they get this idea? From the system selling that idea to them and reinforcing it for them in ways so consistent and normalized that they’ve largely become invisible. So yeah, you’d better believe I want to take a fucking sledgehammer to those value systems.

So I do really wish that we had just as many (if not more) examples of female “empowerment” that were rooted in women resisting the pressure the capitalist patriarchy puts on women to make such choices. This is why I admired Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film Beyond the Lights. It centers on a rising pop star named Noni whose image is a sexualized facade created by the record label for which she is more product than person, an image that doesn’t reflect who Noni really is at all. The image obscures rather than reveals the aspects of herself that she feels make her an artist and a person who is worthy of love, so much that she begins to lose sight of them herself. The film is something of a soap opera and is hardly radical or anti-capitalist in its politics, but it does show a woman resisting the machinery of the capitalist patriarchy and asserting that the things that make her a valuable individual are not the things that patriarchy tells her determine her value.

And when such examples of empowerment are so rare, and the ones that I see far more commonly and that seem to be far more celebrated when they do come along are those of women establishing power within patriarchy by succeeding within its value systems rather than of women actively resisting those value systems or creating alternatives to them, I start to worry that we’re losing sight of the fact that patriarchy is not inevitable, and that our notions of feminism are moving us toward a society that’s distinguished from ours not by any real shift in values but instead just by letting women acquire more power within patriarchal value systems. I don’t want the future to just look like more equal representation of women in violent media. Maybe I hope for too much, in wanting our notions and images of what constitutes empowerment, in the media and in ourselves, to more often illuminate and celebrate alternatives to patriarchy. At one point in Fury Road, Max says “Hope is a mistake. If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.” But I can’t stop hoping. I know we can make a greener place than this. Our world has not been killed but it can be remade. We can plant the seeds.